The Real
Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools
Thursday, March 17, 2016
To support the famine relief effort, British
tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant
farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and
destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine:
Interior of a Peasants Hut)
“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get
pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I
learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato
Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue
to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for
unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants,
and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history.
Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and
present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can
bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school
social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of
“Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:
… Oh it’s
well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history
textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great
Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails
to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible
disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful
single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of
the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,”
and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who
describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly,
social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to
narrate their own horror.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only
deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much
of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced
textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students
will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s
textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of
anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum
bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school
social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn
more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical
questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to
learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the
worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes
in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest
experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof
of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and
other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s
Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000
Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of
grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented
those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance
of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask
students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics
of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist
into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the
“Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions.
Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the
Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more
food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The
hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first:
that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are
overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot
at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our
students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and
inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa,
India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land
are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today’s corporate
textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about
this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish
peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the
corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three
key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson
empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand
million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have
no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose
profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching
materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to
my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project
website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The
British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other
food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and
offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to
denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of
distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and
the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical
questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and
allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts
stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of
green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity.
Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social
forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and
uprooting people today.
© 2015 Zinn Education Project
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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